The present embodiments relate to modeling gear contact. Properly designing a gear box and/or individual gears and optimizing their performance ensures the overall product quality in terms of performance (e.g., dynamics, noise, durability, and/or comfort) and efficiency (e.g., maximize energy yield, and/or minimize friction losses). Virtual design optimization of gears may assist in proper design.
Gears are becoming more flexible, so are prone to operate in less conventional conditions and suffer from durability issues. Lightweight gears are more popular because of the general need of weight reduction caused by stricter regulation on emissions and for higher rotational speed electric motors. Gears are made lighter by reducing the thickness of the gear web (blank) and rim and also by creating holes of different shapes in the web. Besides targeting weight reduction, the lightweight gear blank topology may be used to alter noise, vibration, or harshness (NVH) behavior.
State of the art design tools may not deal with complex industrial lightweight gears in sufficient detail. This limits users to either approximate calculations or to an overly detailed analysis that brings excessive calculation costs and still does not include all relevant physics. The effect of modifications for weight reduction, especially at a system level, is difficult to capture with classical modeling techniques that assume a solid gear blank to model the web stiffness.